Listen Later
I came across this really neat service called Listen Later (referral link). The idea is simple: when you come across an article you don’t have time to read just forward it as an email to this service and it will get converted into a podcast episode that you can listen to in your preferred podcast app. They use AI TTS which sounds reasonably well for it’s purpose. The trial gave me enough credits for about 3 articles (or about 20min of converted audio) and it did a really good job of filtering away the non-article content that gets extracted from the page.
I’ve had this idea in my head for some time and have been surprised no one built something like it until now. Definitely worth a try! From a product perspective, I’d like to see an option to group related articles into a long form episode. Actually, the more I think about it, I would prefer a standalone app that serves more as a content curator with the ability to summarize and read out things dynamically. Like, how great would it be to invent a “fast-forward” affordance that is the equivalent of telling someone “ok, get to the pont” in real time, except the AI responds immediately by shortening the remainder of the summary.
As an aside, this is the first post I’m writing using the GitHub app on my phone. Terrible idea. Will try to find a mobile writer’s tool that can push to git.